One of the benefits of Electron is being able to build the same app for multiple operating systems. When writing GUI app using native OS calls, how does one make sure the code is compatible with all three major operating systems?
Folks did this plenty prior to Electron, either by using cross-platform GUI toolkits (GTK and Qt both run on Windows, Java's been doing this forever with Swing and JavaFX, etc), or by writing GUIs for multiple toolkits/OSes that work with the same/similar core application logic.
Electron makes it easier to build cross-platform apps, and certainly cheaper, but it's not like it's the only way to do it.
I'm the author. I had experience with SDL and wrote a test to confirm it still performs well (I never tried it on linux). It did, SDL has been ported to just about every OS. I have some OS specific code for windows but not much. The only OS specific things were executing a binary + stdio + closing it and slight differences in socket code (mostly used for DAP). C++ now has filesystem support so I didn't need any OS specific code for that
This is an important consideration for the developer/publisher, but less so for the user.
I use all three major operating systems on a daily basis, and typically preferentially prefer single-OS apps, as I can typically expect them to be more performant and to better follow a platform's UI conventions.
